Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Kin of Charity Is Whore

Maybe it is the spiraling cost of food in a tough economy or the logical next step in the movement to eat locally. Whatever the reason, New Yorkers are increasingly fanning out across the city’s parks to hunt and gather edible wild plants, like mushrooms, American ginger and elderberries.

Now parks officials want them to stop. New York’s public lands are not a communal pantry, they say. In recent months, the city has stepped up training of park rangers and enforcement-patrol officers, directing them to keep an eye out for foragers and chase them off.

Daily Gaddis:

- Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. - Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they're so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different..

Also, in The Recognitions, I'd forgotten the phrase "inherent vice" is an art term, particularly relevant to forgers, that refers to the inevitable degradation of a paint, said degradation used as a method of detecting forgeries, when I read this in a couple of years ago, whose author surely was aware of the meaning when naming his novel, and which I'll remember when I reread the novel in two or three years.

Thought experiment: If Obama truly believes in his mission to transcend bipartisanship, that his mission in noble in intent and honorable in execution, what does a 40% approval rating say about America today?

Poetry and politics: Poetry and politics share at least two uses of comparison: one serves an expansionary vision of the world, the other, retrenchment. Both understand the limits of comparison, but the first treats these deferentially, as part of a strategy to bring to mind differences among forms of experience. The second develops self-consciously false, totalizing comparisons among dissimilar things, even as it decries inappropriate comparisons when employed by antagonists. Ironically, both the U.S. political right and some leftist poets at times employ the second strategy, although for opposite goals. The Tea Party’s success in claiming the national midterm debate relied in part on this world-obliterating rhetoric. But it might be the first that better supports action by the left, not because it is tentative but because it imagines that readers may set down the poem and see.

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.
The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.
Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

It's really taking less and less effort for me to pick out the most outrageously overbroad and unsupportable thing you say in each day's merlot.

Which is not to say that war is good. Or beneficial. Because that's really kinda what you're saying, there, asserting the uncommon assumption around here that it's actually good for the economy not to collapse.

Oh, and I'm with Thunder/Deadsong/Whatever I haven't nicknamed him yet; this YFWP ombudsman is a remarkable fucking tool.

Wars are good for fossil fuel companies, defense corporations, financiers of same, and speculators.

(E.g. remember when Goldman Sachs predicted $100/bbl oil back in March 2005? They are also major speculators in that commodity. The firms proprietary traders get the call first, then the best customers, and so on down the trading food chain.)

On the other hand, money in the hands of people living here who need it the most is good for the U.S. economy as whole. (What is Social Security, Alex?)

Now we're going to cut Social Security but keep spending on the wars because the greedheads in charge don't give a shit about the economy. They're only interested in the chunks they can take out of it.~

Thought experiment: Obama truly believes in his mission to transcend bipartisanship, that his mission in noble in intent and honorable in execution, what does a 40% approval rating say about America today?"

?!? there's supposed to be an 'if' in there, right?(I don't mean to pick nits, I'm just confused...)

Honestly, educatedly speculatively, and without having to look it up, because that'd take me somewhere like fucking McMegan's blog? Around the same as the proportion of the Federal budget devoted to the components of defense spending, which is somewhere around 20 percent (give or take 2-3 points).

But of that 20 percent, far, far less than half is honestly attributable to the wars--assuming, as is almost certain, that if you ended the wars right this second and brought everyone home, there'd still be a ridiculously large standing defense establishment.

Also: not arguing with you or Thunder about energy and defense company evil. Duh. Or parasite financial speculators. But all that's an aside from my calling you out on your "collapse" hyperbole. The economy is just as adjustable to increasing the provision of consumer goods--barely a lesser evil around these parts.

And when I say stuff like "around here" and "around these parts," I'm not trying to be a dick, just trying to acknowledge that I'm more of a materialist than many (or all) of my friends here and that I probably operate on a considerably different set of systemic and economic assumptions.

It's not a simple equation of just saying, "we spend all this on war, and if we didn't it's all gone!", BDR.

For one thing, our military uses up enormous amounts of oil while blowing up countries that produce oil (hurray for Exxon, which benefits but doesn't pay U.S. income taxes!).

So what if we didn't do that? It would be good for tourism, airlines, and other businesses that depend on the ability of people to travel and spend.

If the government just stopped spending all the money on war and didn't spend it on something else, this slack economy would surely tank.

But that's not really the question: what if it spent the money on something else? Just for example, what if it simply gave that money to people who need it the most? Because those people would spend it the fastest, and spend it here, you would get more "bang for the buck", economically speaking.~